Forza Motorsport 3 Updated Impressions - Livery Editor and Storefront

Though Forza Motorsport 3 is every bit the simulation racing game its two predecessors were, developer Turn 10 Studios has added a number of features designed to ease in novice players, including the ability to rewind time after a crash and enable assists that handle all the braking for you. But if you go a step further, there exists a side of Forza 3 that has the possibility of appealing to players who aren’t into driving at all. Forza 3’s artistic side comes in the form of the livery editor, which allows players to create their own custom vinyl and paint jobs. Here at PAX 2009, we recently had a chance to meet with Turn 10 community manager Che Chou and senior game designer Bill Giese to see the new livery editor, as well as some of the ways artists can share their work online in the new storefront system.

One thing that Turn 10 found out from Forza 2 was that the game badly needed a blank canvas for creating custom vinyls. Players actually took to adopting the Mini Cooper as the default car for making new vinyls because its roof proved to be the most uniformly flat surface in the game or, at least, the one easiest for making new pieces of art. That’s a problem that’s been fixed in Forza 3. Now, you’ll be able to mess with shapes, decals, and alphanumeric characters to create custom vinyls on a blank screen without the need to load up a car. You can even turn on a grid overlay to keep better track of your design's dimensions. This should help make the process of creating custom pieces of art that can be applied across a wide number of cars a lot easier.

The next logical step that comes after making a sweet paint job is taking your work to the game’s new storefront system. Players have the ability to save screenshots, replay movies, vinyls, paint work, and tuning setups then share them online with others. If you find other players whose work you really enjoy, you can add them to your favorites list without having to add them as Xbox Live friends and easily track all their contributions.

But the really interesting part about the storefront is the economy system behind it. Players can sell their art for in-game credits that can later be used to either buy cars in the single-player game or used toward buying other people’s stuff from their storefronts. The creator can determine the price and how many times the item is sold. If you’re feeling greedy, there’s nothing stopping you from charging 50,000 credits for that sweet new Chicago Bears logo that you just designed any time there’s someone willing to buy it. But if you want to generate a buzz in the online community around your artwork, you can choose to make something really special by making it limited edition. You can also play the part of the generous artist and make your creations free to everyone. As a way of keeping track of the most popular designers, there’s even a section on the online leaderboards for the best-selling graphic artists.

Finally, the pair from Turn 10 made sure we got to see a couple of races before we left. The first was a race on the Nurburgring track in Germany. Chou’s car of choice was the Bugatti Veyron, a 1,000-horsepower beast that holds the distinction of being the fastest street-legal car you can drive. As such, Chou left the competition in the dust at the start and managed to cruise to an easy victory under the gloomy gray skies of the Nurburgring. Later on, he showed us a race at the Circuit de Catalunya in Spain with the Lamborghini Reventon. The Reventon is a sleek, all-black car that looks almost like the Stealth Bomber on wheels. But its most striking trait is one seen from the cockpit view. The Reventon features all-digital gauges that look like the dashboard of a spaceship. It’s truly one of the more exotic cars in the game.

Forza Motorsport 3 is due out for release October 27 on the Xbox 360. Expect to see more coverage over the next couple of months as we peel away more of its features.